and perhaps, on the other hand, they felt that he really was what they called him in mockery, 'wise.' At any rate, after the great disaster of Syracuse he was the man they came to, to write the epitaph on the hopes of Athens.
The tradition, so gentle to Sophocles, raves against Euripides. "He was a morose cynic, privately vicious for all his severe exterior." "He did not write his plays; they were done by his slaves and casual acquaintances." "His father was a fraudulent bankrupt; his mother a greengroceress, and her greens bad. His wife was called Choirilê ('Sow'), and acted up to her name; he divorced her, and his second wife was no better." It delights in passages between the two tragedians in which the poverty-stricken misanthrope is crushed by the good Sophocles, who took to his cups and their bearers like a man, and did not profess to be better than his neighbours.
A few of these stories can be disproved; some are grossly improbable; most are merely unsupported by evidence. It can be made out that the poet's father, Mnesarchides, was of an old middle-class family owning land and holding an hereditary office in the local Apollo-worship at Phlya. His mother, Kleito the 'greengroceress,' was of noble family. Our evidence suggests that her relation towards her son was one of exceptional intimacy and influence; and motherly love, certainly forms a strong element in his dramas. Of Euripides's wife we only know that her name was not Choirilê, but Melitê, and that Aristophanes in 411 could find no ill to say of her. Of his three sons, we hear that Mnesarchus was a merchant, Mnesilochus an actor, Euripides apparently a professional playwright; he brought out the Iphigenîa, Bacchæ, and Alcmeon* after his father's
